The Mantle Of Authority: Steve Elkins Interviews A Member Of The Yes Men

ELKINS: I would like to start by having you detail the events behind how I first heard about The Yes Men. I don't know if you remember, but it was the day I met you. When I first came to your house, in December of 2004, to interview you for my film "The Reach Of Resonance," you mentioned that you had had an "eventful morning."

OSTERTAG: I don't remember this.

ELKINS: You were rather nonchalant about it, and I remember thinking that perhaps your car had broken down, or something simple like that. Instead, you explained that you were a member of a small collective of media pranksters called The Yes Men, and that two hours before I arrived on your doorstep, a member of your group had appeared on one of the major international news networks posing as the head of the Dow Chemical corporation.

OSTERTAG: Oh wow. Yes, now I do remember. I had forgotten that happened the same day.

ELKINS: You explained that through impersonating the company, with the intent of exposing their true policies and practices, your group had actually caused Dow Chemical's stock to fall billions of dollars in the two hours between the television appearance and my arrival on your doorstep. I would love to have you explain what happened that day as an illustration of what The Yes Men do.

OSTERTAG: Andy Bichlbaum, who is one of the Yes Men, went on BBC World News purporting to be Jude Finisterra, a spokesman for Dow Chemical. This was on the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, in which a chemical plant owned by Union Carbide had leaked a huge cloud of toxic gas in India that killed thousands of people. To this day, the mess isn't cleaned up and people continue to get sick, give birth to mutant babies, and it's just a catastrophe. At the time, it was considered to be the biggest industrial accident in the world.

So it was the twentieth anniversary, and BBC had a special segment on Bhopal, twenty years later. In the meantime, Dow has purchased Union Carbide, so Union Carbide is now a subsidiary of Dow. So BBC thought that Jude Finisterra was a bonafide spokesperson for Dow, and he announced that the new CEO of Dow had had a moral epiphany, and was going to reverse course by liquidating Union Carbide, then give the entire proceeds, 12 billion dollars, to the Bhopal survivors. The BBC believed it, and ran it as breaking news for two hours. It got picked up by Reuters, and made headlines all around the world. Dow's stock fell 3 billion dollars between the time this occurred, and the time you arrived at my house.

ELKINS: Didn't they find out it was a hoax later that day?

OSTERTAG: After two hours, Dow put out a retraction saying that this was an imposter, and that Dow really wasn't going to do anything of the sort.

ELKINS: Did Dow make any of that money back?

OSTERTAG: Once it was revealed to be a hoax, Dow's stock went back up, but of course if you sold while it was down, you didn't get your money back.

ELKINS: How did you find out about the Yes Men?

OSTERTAG: Well, I never really "found out" about The Yes Men. They have been friends of mine since before the so-called Yes Men were formed.

ELKINS: How did they form The Yes Men?

OSTERTAG: Well, there's not an organization called The Yes Men, but there are these two guys, Mike and Andy, who are good friends of mine, and they have been involved in various kinds of activities like this. One was the guy who created the Barbie Liberation Front several years ago. He took a bunch of Barbie dolls and G.I. Joe dolls, swapped the voice boxes, and put them back on store shelves. It was a pretty successful thing, because they packaged them up to look like they hadn't been tampered with, but they added a piece of paper that said, "If you have problems with your doll, call this number," and the number was the local television news. So when kids would open the package, and their Barbie doll would say, "Kill, kill, kill," or their G.I. Joe said, "Let's go shopping," or something like that, then they would call this number to complain, and it would be the television news. Mike did this at Christmas, so it got a lot of media coverage.

Andy had been running a website called RTMark.com, which was a website of coporate sabotage that was set up like a mutual fund. You could invest in, or perform, coporate sabotage, and there were ways you could document what you had done so you could get paid the money.

So before they knew each other, they were both doing a lot of this sort of thing, and then once they met, they become The Yes Men.

ELKINS: What is your role in The Yes Men?

OSTERTAG: I don't give the speeches, but I help with the writing, and just thinking things through. There's a book on The Yes Men that I co-wrote. And specific projects like a petition asking Bush to accelerate global warming, (which a lot of people signed).

ELKINS: What do you think has been the most "successful" media prank, or activity conducted by The Yes Men?

OSTERTAG: Well, driving DOW's stock down 3 billion dollars was probably right up there. Though there have been other things. Mike and Andy did a thing in Australia where they spoke on behalf of the World Trade Organization, and announced that the WTO was going to close down and reopen as an aid organization based in Africa. The conference believed it, and put out a press release saying that this was happening, which resulted in an MP in the Canadian Parliament taking the floor to demand that the economic minister of Canada explain what the end of the WTO was going to mean for Canada.

The most recent Yes Men prank was in Calgary, which was the first one where Mike and Andy were yanked off the stage by security. It was an energy conference, and Andy gave the keynote speech representing EXXON. People paid about a hundred dollars a plate, and they basically wrecked these peoples conference. Everyone was expecting EXXON to make some major announcement, and well...they did.

They gave a speech, which was about how EXXON, as a major player in the global energy market, had to plan strategically for the long term and for the worst case. The worst long term case would be that global warming would lead to civilizational collapse, energy scarcity of every kind, and millions of dead people everywhere. One question raised in the speech was what would be the one source of energy which would be abundant when all other forms of energy would be scarce, and the answer was the untapped energy in the human body.

So EXXON, via Andy, announced a new kind of fuel called Vivoleum, which was made from dead humans. During one part of the speech, they showed a video tribute they manufactured regarding a janitor at the EXXON corporate headquarters who had died from inhaling a bad mix of cleaning products, but had volunteered his body to be the first body turned into Vivoleum. Mike and Andy passed out memorial candles to the people at the conference that they claimed were the janitor. The police were called and they ended up getting pulled off the stage by security.

ELKINS: At what point did they figure it out that these were not real EXXON representatives?

OSTERTAG: What's remarkable is that no one figured it out from the content, but somebody in the audience recognized Andy from the Yes Men movie. If they hadn't recognized him, who knows, he probably could have just kept pitching the concept to the audience. One of the things we've discovered is that if you show up with a business suit, and the mantle of authority, and a powerpoint presentation, you can pretty much say anything. As we know from George W. Bush.

ELKINS: Didn't George W. Bush himself have something to say about The Yes Men in a televised interview?

OSTERTAG: Yes. This was when Mike and Andy had made a parody of Bush's campaign website while he was running for his first term as president. It basically included information about Bush's political record, amongst other things, which Bush had tried to suppress from public attention. Bush's response to this website was to state, "There ought to be limits to freedom."

ELKINS: I understand that Mike and Andy devised a suit which expands the freedom of corporate executives.

OSTERTAG: That was a speech given at an insurance industry conference on catastrophic loss. Our Yes Men speech...and we were speaking on behalf of Haliburton, was about how there was no point in profiting from catastrophe unless the corporate executives survived the catastrophe to spend the profits. So executive survivability was a key piece of the puzzle for insurance to think about.

So they unveiled the Haliburton SurvivaBall, which is this inflatable globe-shaped suit executives can wear in the event of global catastrophe that has its own food system, exhaust system, and weapon system. You can jump off of buildings in it, and go underwater, and it has these sort of suction cups so you can link up with other SurvivaBalls and make intelligent pods of amalgamated executives.

People wanted to know how much it costs.

ELKINS: What is the exact legality of Yes Men activities? I've wondered how Andy and Mike don't wind up in prison?

OSTERTAG: They've taken the attitude that they're not going to think too much about that, because they feel that you can't be intimidated by that. If you're going to be intimidated by that, then you might as well just stay home under the bed.

ELKINS: Have they already crossed enough lines that they're running a very serious risk?

OSTERTAG: I think the reality of it is that their protection is the publicity.

ELKINS: That's an interesting issue itself.

OSTERTAG: In a way, the best thing that could happen to them would be if Haliburton sued them, because that would open up a whole other can of worms. As a result of the supreme court decision in the Larry Flint case, where Jerry Falwell tried to sue Larry Flint, and the supreme court ruled that it wasn't liable because no reasonable person would believe that the stuff that Hustler had said about Falwell was anything but parody. Likewise, for Haliburton to sue The Yes Men, they would have to claim that a reasonable person would believe that Haliburton actually would make something like a SurvivaBall. Which would make an interesting court case.

And in fact, The Yes Men did this thing where they spoke on behalf of McDonald's, which is a corporation that's famous for suing anybody that says anything bad about McDonald's, but Mike and Andy gave a speech about how McDonald's had devised a plan to recycle human waste into hamburgers as a way to address hunger in certain parts of the world. And of course, for McDonald's to sue them, they would have to claim that a reasonable person would think that McDonald's puts shit in their hamburgers. We haven't been sued yet.

In fact, The Yes Men have continued to be quite active. Mike and Andy are working on their second Yes Men film now. It should be done fairly soon.

ELKINS: I noticed that at the end of the first film, there is something mentioned about job openings with The Yes Men. I assumed there was a wink attached, but I'm wondering if it has even some grounding in reality, and if so, how does one go about becoming a Yes Men?

OSTERTAG: We always say that there are hundreds of thousands of jobs with The Yes Men. All you have to do to have a job with The Yes Men is do something and say you're a Yes Men. We encourage everyone.

ELKINS: I understand there are people in other countries who have taken on work as Yes Men, so to speak, such as in Europe. I'm curious to know what their activities have been, and if it's any different from the work that Mike and Andy have been doing.

OSTERTAG: No. We are just a network of friends. As you would imagine, to do this sort of thing, it takes a lot of friends. There's no budget, so you have to find sofas to sleep on, and frequent flyer tickets, and somebody who is willing to print a business card, and, you know, it's just a network of friends. That's all it is.

ELKINS: Do Mike and Andy still wear thrift store suits to all their lectures and television appearances?

OSTERTAG: They sure do. There's an air of chaos around The Yes Men. Mike and Andy are a pretty chaotic pair in real life, and it's what enables them to do this thing. So if you have the impression that there's some sort of Yes Men executive committee that sits down and makes decisions with minutes, that's not what the situation is.

ELKINS: Who are you intending to benefit from your work in The Yes Men?

You know, there was a lot of criticism after the Bhopal thing. It got picked up by Reuters and it made the press deadline for Indian newspapers, so there were banner headlines in the Indian news that the Bhopal survivors were actually going to be compensated, and that the site was going to be cleaned up. Obviously this was a big embarrasment for BBC. It's the most watched news program in the world. They're not supposed to have imposters making major policy announcements.

So later that night, channel four in England, which is sort of the competing channel, asked Andy to come on and explain why he had done what he did. They really grilled him over this idea of raising false hopes, you know, how could he do this? Wasn't this a terrible trick to play on the people of Bhopal to announce such a thing? In a lot of the press, this issue was raised. I think it's a completely bogus issue, because in fact, if we hadn't done that, the anniversary of Bhopal would have gone completely unnoticed in most of the world media, and it is twenty years later.

Note: I do not find it a strange coincidence that while Bob and I sat at a table in San Francisco discussing the Yes Mens approach to addressing the events in Bhopal, hundreds of Bhopal survivors were on an indefinite hunger strike in front of the Indian Prime Minister's offices, in an effort to obtain rehabilitation in Bhopal and legal action against Dow Chemical/Union Carbide, after walking 450 miles from Bhopal to government headquarters in Delhi (approximately the same distance as walking from one end of Spain to the other...an ordeal I measured with my own body in 2006, but without the unique personal maladies of each of the Bhopal survivors). Their hunger strikes are still ongoing at the time of writing (July 2008). Their ages range from 6 to 70, and children as young as 6 years old are being beaten and detained by police in reaction to their peaceful protest.

On the other hand, last year 500 village women in Pune, India blocked the entrance to a construction site for a new Dow Chemical plant with their own bodies, and successfully halted the construction.